Victoria Sweet

Everything looked so good in the computer, and yet what Father had gotten was not Medicine but Health Care-- Medicine without a soul. What do I mean by "soul"? I mean what Father did not get. Presence. Attention. Judgment. Kindness. Above all, responsibility.

[In likening Slow Medicine to Slow Food:] Slow Food was not really about fast or slow in time. Rather it was about privileging the basics-- the ingredients, which do take time: farmers' time and gardeners' time, and also their skill, experience, and knowledge. It was about accepting what is-- the seasons, weather, climate-- and flowing with it, not against it. It was about removing what is in the way of a plant being the healthiest, the most fertile, the happiest it could be, and doing so by little actions, by fussing and fiddling. That was how it was "slow."

The essence of Medicine is story-- finding the right story, understanding the true story, being unsatisfied with a story that does not make sense. Healthcare, on the other hand, deconstructs story into thousands of tiny pieces-- pages of boxes and check marks for which no one is responsible.

We can allow for Slow Medicine beds in our hospitals so that doctors have enough time to find out what is really wrong with a patient, and patients have enough time to heal.

...I learned a Slow Medicine lesson: how individual medicine was. It wasn't true that one size fits all, that everyone or no one should have that treatment or this pill. Rather, the right answer had to do with style, with who you were, who the patient was.

We don't need to remake our health-care system or rebuild it from the ground up. We don't need to do very much. It's pretty simple, quite attainable. Just an added perspective and a change of pace.